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Expanding Our Moral Imaginations

Posted by madjillmom on January 13, 2011

I did not watch the Tuscon Memorial last night. I heard snippets of Obama’s speech and then read over it online. If Sarah Palin, who is not a public official, was late to condemn those trying to lay blame (as posited by a Dem on Fox News yesterday), then Pres. Obama was really late to do so. Yes, he said some good things, some touching things. He also finally sounded the undeniable truth that we shouldn’t jump to conclusions regarding this terrible incident, shouldn’t be eager to hijack the issue to our own benefit. He seemed to go back to lecturing us all about our discourse and the need to strive to be better people. I love to be lectured to, don’t you? I would have been so much better if he had admitted to cranking up the rhetoric himself. I would have been impressed if he had admitted to being a sinner while extorting us all to be better. I would have been even more impressed if he had done this before the polls came out that the public wasn’t buying the drumbeat of blaming the conservatives, Sarah Palin, Glenn Beck, Rush Limbaugh or the Tea Party members. I would have been even more impressed if he hadn’t called the media darling Sheriff Dupnik a few days ago and praised his handling of the situation.

The strangest phrase of the speech was requesting that we expand our moral imaginations. What does this mean? I know Obama is a smart man, but I have never heard of our moral imagination. Morals are morals and imagination is imagination. Seems that they do not really go together. In fact, it seems that the murderer was expanding his moral imagination when he did this awful thing. Is there a program available out there to help me expand my moral imagination?